Legacy Admissions Policies Were Originally Created To Keep Jewish Students Out Of Elite Colleges

Legacy admissions policies that give preference to children of
alumni have always been a topic of some controversy, but they
have recently come under greater scrutiny in the broader
conversation on college admissions.

It's not a secret that legacy applicants receive a fairly
significant admissions bump — about a
45% higher chance of getting into a school — and many of the
top universities seem to openly endorse the process, although
they say it only becomes a factor in "tie-break" situations.

... careful accommodation of a limited number of youngsters
whose parents, grandparents and great-grandparents have helped
to lay the foundation on which the institution stands shows a
respect for tradition and honors those without whom the
contemporary university might not even exist.

Of course, this is not the case for all schools. A Massachusetts
Institute of Technology admissions officer wrote
on his blog that "if anyone in our office ever advocated for
a mediocre applicant on the basis of their 'excellent pedigree'
they would be kicked out of the committee room."

He writes that the decision to boost acceptance rates for
children of alumni was spurred by the quickly increasing
immigrant population entering the U.S. at the beginning of the
20th century. As Karabel writes in his introduction (emphasis
ours):

Like the most prestigious universities of other nations,
Harvard, Yale, and Princeton — the three institutions at the
center of this book — admitted students almost entirely on the
basis of academic criteria for most of their long histories.
But this changed in the 1920s, when the traditional academic
requirements no longer served to screen out students deemed
"socially undesirable." By then, it had become clear
that a system of selection focused solely on scholastic
performance would lead to the admission of increasing numbers
of Jewish students, most of them of eastern European
background. This transformation was becoming visible at
precisely the time that the nation-wide movement to restrict
immigration was gaining momentum, and it was unacceptable to
the Anglo-Saxon gentlemen who presided over the Big
Three (as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were called by
then).

In response to the influx of outsiders, Karabel
writes, the Big Three created an admissions system that
still exists in some form today:

The defining feature of the new system was its categorical
rejection of the idea that admission should be based on
academic criteria alone. Though the view that scholastic
performance should determine admission was not uncommon among
the faculty, the top administrators of the Big Three (and of
other leading private colleges, such as Columbia and Dartmouth)
recognized that relying solely on any single factor —
especially one that could be measured, like academic excellence
— would deny them control over the composition of the freshmen
class. Charged with protecting their institutional interests,
the presidents of the Big Three wanted the latitude to admit
the dull sons of major donors and to exclude the brilliant but
unpolished children of immigrants, whose very presence prompted
privileged young Anglo-Saxon men — the probable leaders and
donors of the future — to seek their education elsewhere.
... The centerpiece of the new policy would be "character"
—a quality thought to be in short supply among Jews but present
in abundance among high-status Protestants.